Her mother died when Parker was an infant, and Parker's relationships with her father and stepmother were marked by fear and hatred. Dismissed from Blessed Sacrament Convent school in New York for identifying the Immaculate Conception as spontaneous combustion, Parker entered Miss Dana's, an exclusive New Jersey girls' school, where she received an excellent classical education, read La Rochefoucauld, wrote poetry, and became interested in social issues. She graduated in 1911.
When her father died in 1912, leaving the family without money, Parker found work writing captions at Vogue for ten dollars a week. Two years later she moved to Vanity Fair, where, under Frank Crowninshield's tutelage, she developed the wit and critical taste that allowed her to move into New York's literary circles. In 1917 she married a young Wall Street broker, Edwin Bond Parker II. She divorced Parker in 1928 but retained his name even after marrying Alan Campbell in the early 1930s. Parker continued her work at Vanity Fair, becoming drama critic in 1918.
The 1920s proved a time of achievement and tension. Fired from Vanity Fair in 1920--chiefly for panning Billie Burke (wife of Florenz Ziegfeld) in the play Caesar's Wife --Parker turned to free-lancing and writing a drama column for Ainslee's .
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